


What is Lost and What is Learned

by grainjew



Category: Naruto
Genre: (so much fucking sealing), Friendship, Grief/Mourning, Sealing, adhd naruto, and for that matter neji also, he may not be adhd exactly but imo hes definitely in that area of brainweird, i cant think of a single time these two interact in canon but they should be friends imo, man this took awhile to write but im pretty proud of it actually
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-23
Updated: 2017-09-23
Packaged: 2019-01-04 09:49:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,403
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12166500
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grainjew/pseuds/grainjew
Summary: or: Naruto, please stop sealing important scrolls in your trashAfter everything, Naruto and Tenten work on their sealing and work through their mourning"Mm," she says. Ugh, her ramen's probably cold by now. "I don't blame you, you know.""Just yourself." She can't deny that one. "He made his choice," he says, and looks at her with eyes so earnest she desperately wants to believe him. "He made his choice, to die on his own terms. Like his father. I didn't deserve his life, but it was given to me, so it's my burden. You shouldn't have to... He would've wanted you to be happy."





	What is Lost and What is Learned

**Author's Note:**

> shana tova have a sweet fic to go with your apples and honey  
> may your name be inscribed and sealed in the book of life for the new year!!

"Hey, Tenten, you free?"

Tenten sighs internally at the appearance of the second-loudest shinobi in her age group (Lee is loudest), his yellow hair all mussed up as always like a bird's nest. She has been sealing weapons, working on replenishing her stores to the level they were at before the war and resolutely not thinking about how Neji had died and she hadn't even been there to protect him, how the streets are quieter now with everyone they lost, _Lee_ is quieter now with nobody to echo off of. This is supposed to be her day off.

"Yeah, guess so," she says, sealing a nice array of shuriken and kunai in the last spot in her scroll and rolling it up. She technically has one more to do before her break, but... well, she's been meaning to talk to Naruto for awhile now. For many reasons.

"Great!" he says, and leans on his elbows over her table. "I was wondering if, uh," he hesitates suddenly and bites his lip, moves his eyes to the tree-line, "you could teach me sealing?"

Okay, that wasn't the question she'd been expecting. She raises an eyebrow.

Unsurprisingly, he continues to talk, standing back up. "Just, y'know how my dad was really good at seals, and mom and her whole clan, too! And also Pervy Sage was a sealmaster but he didn't teach me much cause he said I had to learn a lot more chakra control and work on that stuff instead of learn something completely new. And then he died." His energy seems to suddenly leave him, and he almost flops to the ground, landing in a seated position. "So... I guess I feel like it'd be a way to honor them, y'know? And this way I can help out the Tailed Beasts, too. There's some stuff I want to try with my seal, for Kurama and the others."

That makes sense. And she really doesn't like how serious his face is as he asks, buoyancy dimmed to to a memory. "Why me, though?"

"We-ell," answers Naruto, tilting his head to the side, "Kakashi-sensei's really busy these days so even if he knows a little, which he does, he can't teach me anything, plus he's a genius so he's really bad at teaching someone like me. And you're the best at seals, anyways!" He grins at her.

Tenten doubts very much that that is true. "All I know are storage seals."

"Yeah, but you're _really_ good at those. Plus this way we can learn together!"  He clasps his hands together, looks at her with what he probably thinks are puppy-dog eyes. "Pleeeease, Tenten?"

"Fine," she says finally, letting out an audible sigh this time and unrolling her last scroll. "You know how to write storage seals, right?"

He scratches the back of his head, sheepish. "Uh, not very well."

What has she roped herself into?

 

An hour later, she has unsealed an extra chair and Naruto has just about filled up her nice new scroll with clumsily-drawn storage seals, some of which even work. Tenten is passing the time running through katas and aiming at leaves from across the clearing with shuriken. Boring stuff, but necessary. She really needs a sparring partner. Also, the Bashosen back. Maybe she can get Naruto to figure out who took it from her when she fainted from chakra exhaustion using it.

All in all, it's not the peace and quiet she was hoping for, coming out to the forest, she thinks as Naruto gives a yell of triumph from ten feet away, but it's not awful. Then she wanders over to see what he did this time.

"I got a leaf in!"

He's pointing an ink-stained finger at a decently-constructed seal, the indicator for full filled in. She frowns at it critically. "Your circles have gotten better."

"Thanks, Tenten!" he says, smiling at her like she's the best person in the world, which is honestly kind of weird for a compliment that small.

"You still need practice, though," she cautions. "Here, take the scroll home, and then find your own paper after that.  Gimme back my brush, though, I like that thing." She snatches it from his hand before he can answer.

"Um, okay. Thanks, Tenten!"

"Now shoo, I need this clearing. Unless...." She hesitates, dangles a kunai from her fingers. "Want to spar?"

He looks suddenly both refreshed and delighted. _Boys_. "Oh, you're on. Kunai only?"

How thoughtful. "Let's go!"  Realization hits her, and her small smile fades. "Uh, after I put that table away."

 

Two days later, over Ichiraku ramen, Naruto unseals a small stack of papers and a single scroll from a very meticulously-drawn seal on the back of an instant ramen label.

"Nice seal," she says, eyeing the contents. "What's all that?"

"Thanks, me and my shadow clones practiced a _lot_!" He looks very proud.

"Maybe pick something less likely to be confused for trash next time?" she suggests, not entirely sure why she bothers trying.

"Eh. It was in my pocket." He shrugs. "Anyways, enough about that! I think you'll _really_ like what I just brought you!"

Tenten, eloquently, raises an eyebrow. "Oh?"

"Yeah!" He shoves the papers at her. "Here, look!"

She looks. It takes only a few seconds, though, before she is staring back up at him instead. "This is..."

"Dad's and old man Second's notes on the Hiraishin, yep! The scroll is old man Second's, apparently he was _super_ scrupulous about all the jutsus he made, which was how Orochimaru could get his hands on Edo Tensei." He wrinkles his nose. "The papers are Dad's, from when he was learning it and improving it. Turns out Kakashi-sensei got a bunch of Dad's stuff after him and Mom died, so he dug them up for me."

"Huh," says Tenten, recovering. "I reiterate what I said about picking a better place to put them next time."

"You're no fun at all," says Naruto.

"So I've been told." Tenten holds her flat face for a few more seconds and then looks down again, unrolling the scroll. The _Hiraishin_. Now that's a thought.

"I figured we could learn it together!" says Naruto.

_This is way more advanced than anything I've ever tried._ "...Yeah, I'd like that."

She skims through the scroll in the time it takes Naruto to eat another three bowls of ramen — how does the Second Hokage talk so much about the pieces she doesn't care about at all, seriously — and then just as she is about to pick up the first of the Fourth's notes she stops. Naruto, seemingly sensing her disquiet, looks up from slurping with a question on his face.

"Neji..." she says slowly, and he seems to shrink. "If I'd had this jutsu, then maybe I could have protected him."

Naruto opens his mouth, then changes his mind and shuts it. Finally, he says, "Yeah, maybe you coulda. But... look, Tenten, his death wasn't your fault."

"I wasn't there to protect him," she snaps back. "He was my teammate. That was my _job_."

"Mine too, then," says Naruto. His mouth twists, and she feels a sudden kinship with him. She hadn't _been there_ , he had and had had to watch as Neji died to protect him. They share a guilt, and he carries it about as well as she does. "As his friend."

"Mm," she says. Ugh, her ramen's probably cold by now. "I don't blame you, you know."

"Just yourself." She can't deny that one. "He made his choice," he says, and looks at her with eyes so earnest she desperately wants to believe him. "He made his choice, to die on his own terms. Like his father. I didn't deserve his life, but it was given to me, so it's my burden. You shouldn't have to... He would've wanted you to be happy."

"It was a dumb choice. I was supposed to be there, to talk him out of those. Him and Lee and Gai-sensei. There had to have been another way." And blaming herself moves the hurt from her heart to her gut, she is aware enough to admit that.

"If it helps a little, he really sounded content when he died," says Naruto, tentatively.

Tenten considers. "Yeah... yeah maybe it does, a little."

Silence falls.

"So!" says Naruto, cheerfulness settling over his features with alarming speed. "Are we gonna start on the Hiraishin?"

It's the clumsiest topic change she's ever heard, but she isn't going to fight it. There is enough time to think about her dead in the future. For now, she's going to learn and learn and make sure to keep everyone else alive.

"Yeah, let's do it."

 

Three weeks later finds them lying on their stomachs in Tenten's little clearing, struggling with copies of the Fourth’s notes - the originals had been returned to Kakashi for safekeeping after Naruto sealed them in one too many pieces of ramen-related trash.

“This is hardly even a sealing jutsu,” complains Tenten after a good ten minutes of silent, narrow-eyed staring, letting out an exasperated breath and dropping her head to rest on the ground. “The seals the Fourth and the Second used have nothing to do with each other! It’s like the seals don’t have anything to do with the jutsu at all, except to provide a marker!”

“There’s no hand-seals, though,” says Naruto. “So it has to be the written seals that shape it, right?”

“Your Rasengan doesn’t have any hand-seals,” mutters Tenten sullenly.

“That’s just a bunch of raw chakra, though,” says Naruto. “This is, like, fifty times more weird and complicated. I still haven’t gotten through my head what exactly’s even happening in it.”

Tenten looks back up and rests her chin on a fist. "What don't you get?" Naruto isn't _dumb_ , no matter what she'd thought even a year ago. If he doesn't fully understand the technique, then that would explain why he hasn't been contributing so much.

Naruto rolls over and flops onto his back. "I mean, I get how it's _used_ , Dad told me during the War that his chakra needs to be touching the thing he wants to move and where he wants it to go, that pretty much makes sense. But, the actual way it works..." He scrunches up his face. "I'm not really very good at learning things from books, so all the explanations from Dad and old man Second don't really make much sense to me. I keep glazing over them instead of getting what they're saying."

"Huh, Neji is..." says Tenten without really thinking about it, and then she bites her lip as realization hits. "...was kind of like that."

Naruto practically springs to sitting and leans forward. "Wait, _he_ was? _Neji_?" His eyes are wide like the news is lifechanging. "But wasn't he Rookie of the Year when you guys graduated?"

Tenten switches which fist is supporting her head. "His ninjutsu, taijutsu, and chakra control were away and above everyone else in the class, and he said once that he figured out pretty fast that if he worked on his chakra control while he was reading or someone was talking -- like, you know, keeping a leaf stuck to your chin or whatever -- he could focus on whatever it was a lot better." She shuts her eyes and plants her face back on the ground. She had not intended to talk that much. She hadn't intended for Neji to come up today at all.

"I wish I'd known..." says Naruto. "We coulda.... I don't know. I guess I never thought, cause he was a genius, that he could be the same as me in that sort of way."

The deep regret in his voice sounds almost disproportionate to the topic, plaintive and quiet. Tenten wants to echo it back, to synchronize her grief with his, but she stops herself even as she opens her mouth with the memory of what this leads to. Clinging to each other, they will spiral deeper into recollection and regret, and Naruto — who had had to process Neji's death in an instant and formulate a response to the man who killed him — will be left to drag her out of the well. She can't put that burden on him again.

Instead, she takes a deep breath and does what Naruto would do: change the topic.

"How the Hiraishin works is essentially somewhere between the Summoning Jutsu and a storage seal," explains Tenten, removing her face from the grass and rubbing at it as she moves to sit cross-legged. "It takes the object from its position in space, removes it from this dimension to move in an instant, and then deposits it elsewhere in space, with the user's chakra as a guide for the placement." Tenten runs a hand through her hair and hopes she got everything right. Books aren't exactly _her_ strength either. She doesn't think they're the strength of _anyone_ on Team Gai.

"Wait, it's like the _Summoning Jutsu?_ " says Naruto, latching onto her distraction like a leech and looking at her incredulously. "Why didn't you say that three weeks ago? I know _lots_ about summoning, and even better, I can summon people who know way more than me!"

"I dunno, I guess I just thought you'd thought of it already."

Naruto grins at her. "Let's consult the toads!"

That is all the warning Tenten gets before Naruto bites his thumb and slams it to the ground. Tenten eyes the seal that spreads outwards from his hand with interest and a sudden regret that she had not looked further into the Summoning Jutsu -- the sealwork looks intricate and absolutely fascinating.

And then a gigantic toad poofs into being on the edge of the clearing, pipe dangling casually from his mouth. "Naruto, it's been too long! What's the issue? Ma and Pa miss you, you know! You need to come visit more often!"

Tenten takes in the crushed tree-trunks under the toad's enormous bulk, foliage suddenly strewn all over the ground, and thinks, _well, there goes my nice little clearing_.

Then she sticks all the scattered notes into a seal before they get blown away or stepped on and stands up to meet a toad. Time to learn about summoning.

 

Four months later, Naruto returns from a diplomatic trip to half the Great Nations with a pocket’s worth of assorted ramen-label seals that unseal into an armload of scrolls.

Tenten spots him at Ichiraku, half-asleep over a fifth bowl and covered in all the dust of travel. Typical, that he'd stop for ramen before even changing his clothes.

She slides into the seat beside him, pokes him in the shoulder. He looks around all bleary. Then his eyes widen and his head shoots up.

"Oh no! Mini-Omoi!" His eyes dart around for a few moments, until he spots her and drops his shoulders, resigned. "Oh, hi, Tenten.  Seen a gloomy genin with a Cloud headband around anywhere?"

"Uh, no?" says Tenten, projecting confusion.

"She's supposed to be sticking with me, but when she's not worrying herself half to death she keeps running off on impulse. I'll give her this one, dunno if I'm proud or annoyed." He looks at Tenten and seems to realize that that clarified absolutely nothing, because he adds, "Oh! Mini-Omoi's from the Cloud, I kinda kidnapped her — well, really, she kidnapped herself — so she's hanging out with me till next time we're in Lightning. She's... not actually related to Omoi. I _think_. She's just basically a mini version of him, like, personality-wise. Also appearance-wise too I guess."

"Huh. Alright," says Tenten. "And you were just able to bring a Cloud nin into the village and let her run around unsupervised?" The amount of political clout Naruto wields these days without even realizing is slightly terrifying.

"I mean, everyone's allies now, aren't they? Plus technically _I_ was gonna be supervising her."

"You don't seem too bothered by her leaving you half-asleep at Ichiraku's," says Tenten wryly.

"She's a good kid, she'll be fine."

"It's not her I was worried about," she retorts, but then decides to let the matter lie. Clearly, she is getting nowhere. "I've got something to show you."

Naruto perks up. "Oh?"

In answer, she grins and unceremoniously Hiraishins to seal on the wall of her room, then back to the seal she'd placed on the counter during their conversation.

The look on Naruto's face is worth every late night.

"You did it!" he says, voice all awed, pure joy and admiration. "You actually did it!"

"Sure did," says Tenten dryly, but she can't help a little pride seeping into her voice despite herself. Naruto's happiness is infectious.

He blushes and scratches his head. "Teach me?"

"That was implicit," says Tenten, almost rolling her eyes. "Even if I said I wouldn't, you'd pester me until I did."

"I-- yeah, okay, I totally would." Naruto reaches into his pocket and pulls out some slips of paper that look suspiciously like instant ramen labels. "Before we do that, though, I've also got something to show you! It's not as good as yours, but..." With accompanying puffs of smoke, he unseals a whole collection of scrolls from what is definitely more ramen trash. "Sealing jutsus! A bunch of these are from Gaara's library, but there's at least one from each of the Great Nations!"

Tenten finds herself staring. "How did you _get_ those?"

"Uh. I asked? I mean, that one merchant in the Mist I got the food-stasis seal from wanted a trade, but that was pretty much an exception."

"Still..."

Naruto tilts his head to the side. "Kurama wants me to add that it probably has something to do with me being appointed the arbiter at the next Summit, but I think Kurama needs to stop being so cynical all the time."

Tenten, to her slight horror, finds herself agreeing with the kyuubi.

"'sides, a lot of these, especially the ones Gaara gave me, they're Uzumaki jutsus." His voice quiets. "And, well, I'm one of the only Uzumaki left, at least that still call themselves Uzumaki, so..."

Tenten imagines what it would be like to find out she has a clan, and then to find out almost immediately after that practically everyone in it is dead. Then she decides to stop imagining it. "Ah."

"As long as one person remembers and can pass that memory on, then the Uzumaki still live, I think," says Naruto, still somber. "But that's not what we should be talking about right now! We should be celebrating you getting the Hiraishin!" She can see him plaster a smile onto his face; wonders at how close they have become that she can read him like that now. She would have thought it genuine not so long ago. "I have something else for you also!"

"Wait, seriously?" She would have thought that a genuinely ridiculous number of new jutsus would be more than enough of a gift. Not that she had even been expecting a gift in the first place.

He produces an actual sealing scroll this time and unrolls it across his lap with a flourish. "You bet!"

The smoke clears to reveal the familiar, _beautiful_ form of her beloved Bashosen, returned to her at last. She snatches it almost before she can even process its existence in front of her, shakes it out and strokes the feathers of it. Intact. Terrifying. Perfect. "I missed you," mutters Tenten, taking in its form. Truly a masterwork of weaponry.  She hadn't had time to appreciate it properly in all the chaos of war.

"Oh, uh, thank you," she says belatedly, looking up from the Bashosen with reluctance to see Naruto beaming at her. "Thank you _so much_."

"No problem!" He looks genuinely happy. It's a weird sensation, to make someone happy with her own happiness. Tenten decides she likes it. "Wanna tell me how you got the Hiraishin to work?"

_As long as one person remembers and can pass that memory on, the Uzumaki still live._ She recalls Naruto's words from earlier, turns them over in her mind. As long as one person, or two people, or three, remember and pass that memory on, Neji still lives. _He would have wanted you to be happy._

_I'm trying, Neji._

_And next time, I will know enough to protect those precious to me._

She opens her mouth, and she does her best to explain the jutsu.

**Author's Note:**

> naruto continues to seal random important shit in ramen labels for the rest of his life. he keeps them in a special pocket of his coat. tenten despairs.


End file.
